Nowhere Home
by Shooz
Summary: Steve has everything…Except what he was looking for in the first place. Some Minecraft lore regarding the Nether, villagers and endermen.


**Nowhere Home**  
>Sep 2011<br>By Shooz

_Summary: Steve has everything…Except what he was looking for in the first place. Some Minecraft lore regarding the Nether, villagers and endermen included._

*

I don't remember how long it's been since I woke up on that sandy shore countless miles from here. I owned nothing but my life and the tattered clothes on my back. I don't remember anything before that, assuming there was anything to begin with. The only things I knew were my name and the creatures of the daylight. After dark, it was a whole new world.

My only motivation was to stay alive. I survived zombie hoardes, skeletal archers, giant spider ambushes, and more creeper explosions than I'm comfortable thinking about. I've traveled across entirely new lands; crossing godforsaken deserts, miserable rainforests, freezing tundra, vast savannas and I've sailed across entire seas, leaving nothing but shoddy, crumbling shelters in my wake.

All that hardship seems like nothing but a bad dream as I admire my land from the safety of my stone watchtower. Years of travel brought me to a pristine, resource-rich landscape that I was finally prepared to make my own. It was these two hands that constructed the comfortable life before me. The humble fort to the great castle, the farms, docks, traps, monuments—a whole village!

A village of one.

Since the day I awoke, I was determined to find others like myself. For all the miles behind me, all the biomes crossed, all the monsters slaughtered, caves mined, structures built, all the pain suffered; I have no fellow human to show for it, only an empty town. I found some creatures that came close, but it was still not the same. There is a village not far from me, inhabited by beings who are sentient, but not quite human.

I discovered their village many years ago, and they have been peaceful since. They were human-like, but with tall, bald heads and enormous beak-like noses. Their foreheads are tattooed with the same horizontal bar, and they walk with their hands clasped together as if by tradition. The villagers and I don't speak the same language; and I don't believe we ever will. I'm not capable of making half the sounds they make. There has always been a silent alliance between us.

The villagers seemed to pity me, offering me food and a place to stay until I built my first shelter. They're an extremely passive people who had somehow become one with the land and its creatures. Even the most vicious of monsters did not harm them. I, however, was still not immune even by association. They were devoutly religious, each villager attending church every day when the sun was at its highest point.

An omnipotent force called "Notch" was their God, or at least from what I could tell. They chanted the name over and over. I spent a lot of time looking through their books. They were written in a language I couldn't read, but the pictures scrawled on the pages and carved into their walls told the gist of it. They depicted the world beneath supposed face of Notch. There were drawings of villagers and monsters living in harmony. Pictures of villagers being cast into a fiery underworld for killing one of Notch's creatures. It was then I learned that they did not eat meat, why their crops were so large, and why they gave me dirty looks when I shoved steak down my throat in front of them.

I eventually learned that this "underworld" of theirs was no myth. One image showed each individual layer of the land from grass to bedrock. Below the impenetrable bedrock showed a grim land of lava and ghost-monsters, pig-like zombies and dangerous fortresses. There was a diagram of a 'portal' made from obsidian. This was the beginning of an irreversible sin that I still pay for to this day.

In my desperation for humankind, I decided to experiment with this portal and see what I could find. I thought the villagers might be able to help me, but when I brought them the obsidian I pain-stakingly collected, they panicked and threw it all into the blacksmith's forge. The Netherworld was a touchy subject for them, it seemed. I chose an area high atop a hill to built this portal, and to my amazement, it was no fable.

Igniting the obsidian just like the book instructed led me to a place below the bedrock that should never, ever be traversed. I understood immediately why the portal was forbidden to the villagers as I dodged bombs shot from the mouth of a giant spectre, narrowly avoided falling in an ocean of magma, and fought my way through packs of living fireballs. The Nether is an experience I don't wish to talk about. Long story short, I was stuck there for what seemed like only a few hours, but when I finally found my way back through the portal, the saplings I planted were fully-grown trees.

I vowed to never enter the portal again, leaving it to decay on the top of that lonely hill. I could see it from my bedroom window each night, haunting me. One night I noticed an unnaturally tall, shadowy figure standing beside it. It looked like a human with grotesquely stretched limbs, surrounded by the same purple smoke the portal emitted. I watched in horror as several more identical creatures emerged from the portal, then vanished into thin air.

As soon as dawn broke I destroyed the portal and sealed the site with a brick tomb. It seemed I was too late, as the next night those same shadowy monsters were roaming the land, taking chunks out of the trees and earth. Night after night, day after day, they eroded the land—and my structures. I called them "endermen", creatures who did not come from this land nor the Nether, but from the mysterious End—the land between worlds. My attempts to fight them were futile; I had only ever killed one and it was an accident. It had fallen into a lake, and I discovered their weakness to water. A moat was added around my fort by the next week.

To this day, the villagers aren't aware that I'm responsible for this dark force plaguing the world, but they definitely feel the effects. I see them repairing their homes and attending church more often, with desperate pleas to Notch to rid them of this scourge. Their prayers were answered, because after some time, the endermen became less destructive. No longer did they steal chests and rip chunks from our walls, though they still rearranged the land to their liking. The endermen had been unleashed, and they were here to stay.

I can't say I'm totally alone. I have a farm full of animals, loyal pet wolves in my kennels, and of course the villagers. They are not—and never will be—human, but in a world of bloodthirsty zombies, skeletons of warriors who still fight their battles, explosive creepers, hungry spiders, and creepy endermen…I'm grateful to have them.


End file.
